The other WILDE child: Oscar Wilde’s brother was once tipped as the star in the family,
Willie has Oscar’s coy, carnal smile and fatuous giggle and not a little of Oscar’s spirit. But he is awful – a veritable tragedy of family likeness.’ So said the essayist Max Beerbohm, of Oscar Wilde’s dishevelled elder brother Willie Wilde.
It’s never easy being the less famous sibling. The best of it is that you’re carried along on the wave of the more famous sibling’s success. The worst is that you’re constantly compared with them and found wanting. In his elegant and touching book about three unsung siblings – Willie (brother of Oscar), Mabel Beardsley (sister of artist Aubrey) and his own great-great uncle Howard Sturgis (brother of novelist Julian) –
Caricature of Oscar being comforted by his brother Willie after the American failure of his play Vera
Matthew Sturgis shines an enquiring light on this tricky role.
Both Oscar and Willie Wilde showed great academic promise as boys in Dublin. But while Oscar leaned towards workaholism and abstinence, Willie (two years older) inclined towards alcoholism. A lawyer, he was called to the bar, but the work never flowed, partly thanks to his own laziness.
When he moved to London in 1872 to try his hand as a drama critic and jobbing hack, this gave both brothers an opportunity. Oscar yearned to be a published poet and playwright, and now Willie could promote him. He helped to create a myth around Oscar as the embodiment of the new aestheticism. (Behind the scenes, he did hilarious imitations of his brother in full aesthetic mode.)
At first, Willie was the more successful playwright. Whereas Oscar’s first play, Vera, flopped, Willie’s, The Tinted Venus, was a triumph. But his next play was pulled at the last minute, and he was soon in the bankruptcy courts.
Oscar seemed to be happily married to the wealthy Constance Lloyd, which caused Willie some envy. That marriage was later found to be a part-sham, when it emerged that he had a parallel life of affairs with men.
Not to be outdone in the marriage stakes – though in poor health – Willie married a twice-divorced American woman called MrsLeslie, head of a New York magazine-publishing empire. Their marriage was a failure. Willie’s bossy wife saw him as a ‘semi-invalid who refused to work, came home drunk in the early hours, and left false teeth on the bedside table’. ‘He is of no use to me either by day or night,’ she remarked – and, at the end of a trip from New York to London, she left him there, and then divorced him. To his frustration, he could no longer get his hands on her money, and had to move in with his mother.
Oscar Wilde at his peak
Oscar’s star was in the ascendant, with the success of Lady Windermere’s Fan, and then of The Importance Of Being Earnest. He ‘seemed to move in a crowd of adoring, even fawning, young men’. Willie, by contrast, was now an alcoholic, short of cash. Hosts caught him filling his pockets with their cigars.
Oscar took offence at Willie’s less-than-glowing review of Lady Windermere’s Fan, and the brothers became estranged. Then, in 1895, came Oscar’s downfall: his conviction after the failure of his libel action against the Marquess of Queensberry, who’d left a card at Oscar’s club describing him as ‘a somdomite’ (he couldn’t spell) for having an affair with his son. Willie was dismayed by his brother’s arrest and the revelations, Sturgis writes, but ‘was there a small bit of satisfaction in finding his ever-more-successful brother suddenly immersed in scandal?’
He set about trying to defend his brother, but Oscar despaired at this prospect, knowing Willie’s ineptitude. ‘My poor brother writes that he is defending me all over London; my poor, dear brother, he could compromise a steam engine.’
On the evening he was bailed, Oscar tried to find accommodation, but all hotels were barred to him. He arrived on the doorstep of the Chelsea house where Willie and their mother lived, and pleaded, ‘Give me shelter, Willie. Let me lie on the floor, or I shall die in the streets.’ Willie welcomed him in, and he collapsed over the threshold ‘like a wounded stag’.
Willie started a campaign of vilification against the Marquess of Queensberry, but he undermined his own good work by writing things such as ‘Thank God my vices were decent.’ So the brotherly estrangement continued, and the end of Oscar’s two-year prison sentence did not bring reconciliation. Oscar went off to the Continent, and Willie wandered the streets of Chelsea, bent and broken. He died of influenza and what the papers euphemistically called ‘Bohemianism’ in 1899, aged 46. Oscar died 18 months later, at the same age.
Aubrey Beardsley
It was thanks to the willowy, Titian-haired Mabel Beardsley that her younger brother Aubrey (born just a year after her) became an artist. They knocked on the door of the artist Edward Burne-Jones, who took one look at Mabel and invited them in. Aubrey showed him his work, and Burne-Jones said, ‘Give up whatever you may be doing for art.’ Aubrey loathed his job in an insurance office, to which he’d been sent by his father, so this was a godsend. He was commissioned to illustrate a new edition of Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur. His style was so daringly erotic that ‘the Beardsley Cult’ took hold.
But the ‘Beardsley Boom’ went bust after Oscar Wilde’s fall, when he began to be associated with
Wilde’s now discredited attitudes. He’d illustrated Wilde’s play Salome; his illustrations had been ‘both hailed and condemned as the acme of fin-de-siecle decadence’. He was sacked from his job as illustrator of the magazine The Yellow Book, and died of TB in France, aged just 25.
Mabel, reflecting in her beloved brother’s former glory, which revived after his death, became an actress. Hers is a sad story: grieving for her brother, she never really made it, and suffered from fainting spells and frailty. Yeats visited her on her deathbed and wrote poems about her.
Howard Sturgis was the less successful brother of novelist Julian Sturgis – although these days, Howard is the better known of the two. Julian’s novels are forgotten, while one of Howard’s, Belchamber, has been reprinted in the USA.
Sturgis paints a lively portrait of his eccentric bachelor great-great uncle, who was addicted to embroidery. He said he did it because he ‘did not smoke’, and needed something to do with his hands.
Inheriting a large fortune, he lived in a large house in Windsor with his younger male companion, nicknamed ‘Babe’, entertaining friends including the novelist Henry James. He was a brilliant conversationalist: ‘as composed as a dowager, yet at the same time audacious as a street boy’.
This trio of biographical miniatures brings back a lost age when the repression of Victorian
England started to loosen. All three stories end in death. As ‘Babe’ sat patiently by his bedside for hours on end waiting for him to die, Howard Sturgis said, ‘A watched pot never has boiled.’ But then he died.